This was in June.
After a long training session one morning, my Muay Thai class moved into the big room to spar. My friend (let’s call her Susan) and I began fighting. Nothing serious. We weren’t, like, unloading on each other. But when I tried to teep kick her in the solar plexus, Susan blocked it, and as my leg traveled down, her foot remained adhered to my knee, and once my foot touched the mat–CRACK!–my patella orbited my leg like a tiny planet.
Full disclosure: I’m not a pro, never have been and never will be. I’m not even an amateur—more like a dabbler. So the comparison I’m about to make may sound ridiculous at first, but remember: Some experiences, and the truths derived therefrom, are universal, cutting across space, time, and my inability to teep kick a woman during a contest in which nothing but pride was at stake.
So here’s the deal. For fighters, the “agony of defeat” has several dimensions, as I learned in June and as the great middleweight Anderson Silva learned last month, when his tibia and fibula cracked like ice at UFC 168, thanks to Chris Weidman’s brilliant kick-check. First, you experience the literal agony, which has a way of focusing the mind unlike anything else. When you suffer, say, a bad break (Silva) or dislocation (me), your entire being focuses on the physical, so the true meaning of your loss doesn’t come into focus until later. This is the agony as fighters know it, and it is bad enough.
But after the agony, you agonize. You turn over every detail of your loss, and the bitch of it is, you have time to think about it, because you’re laid up, doctor’s orders. During my three months of rehab, I replayed every hazy detail of the events leading up to my injury, taking care to lambast myself at every opportunity.
Such opportunities were legion.
The night before, I’d stayed out late drinking, so I wasn’t exactly feeling it in class. Also, by the time I squared off against Susan, I’d already had my ass kicked by two other people. I was gassed, beat up, and off my game, which, truth be told, even under optimal conditions, isn’t anything to write home about. What was I thinking training that day, let alone sparring?
None of this mattered. It didn’t change a thing about what happened. Susan can fight, and it’s more than possible that she would’ve blocked that teep kick and accidentally dislocated my knee regardless of the circumstances. But that’s not how the agony of defeat works for fighters (and dabblers). Even if I hadn’t been in the throes of a mild but persistent hangover, and even if two other fighters hadn’t whacked me around before I hit the mat, my knee on the wrong side of my leg, the process demands that you give your ego a thorough lashing. So I did.
For Silva, this has to be even worse, and not just because his injury was far more debilitating than mine. He’s falling from a much greater height than I am (think the Empire State Building versus a stool), and he’s going to have a long recovery process. Even though his camp is making noises about a comeback against Georges St-Pierre, and even though Silva is putting a happy face on his recovery, he has to be agonizing about his defeat in Technicolor: What if I’d turned my hip over a little more? What if I’d tried a body shot instead? What if… what if… what if…
For Silva, it’s not just that he lost; it’s that he’s experiencing a classic and inevitable arc in a fighter’s life, the one writer Jack London was thinking of when he wrote, “Always were these youngsters rising up in the boxing game, springing through the ropes and shouting their defiance; and always were the old uns going down before them. They climbed to success over the bodies of the old uns. ”
That’s inevitable. That’s life. That’s agony.
VIA: Vice